CONFIDENTIAL MEMO
FROM FBI AGENT D. M. LADD
TO FBI DIRECTOR J. EDGAR HOOVER
APRIL 27, 1943
Mr. Hemingway has been connected with various so-called Communist front organizations and was active in aiding the Loyalist cause in Spain. Despite Hemingway’s activities, no information has been received which would definitely tie him with the Communist Party or which would indicate that he is or has been a Party member. His actions, however, have indicated that his views are “liberal” and that he may be inclined favorably to communist political philosophies. At the present time he is alleged to be performing a highly secret naval operation for the Navy Department. In this connection, the Navy Department is said to be paying the expenses for the operation of Hemingway’s boat, furnishing him with arms and charting courses in the Cuban area. The Bureau has conducted no investigation of Hemingway, but his name has been mentioned in connection with other Bureau investigations and various data concerning him have been submitted voluntarily by a number of sources.
Gellhorn finally asked Hemingway for a divorce in late 1944. She had stayed with him at the finca on and off during his long year of absences while on sub-chasing patrols in the Pilar through all of 1943 and into the spring of 1944. Writing to her while she was in London, Hemingway complained that the empty finca was lonelier than limbo. When she returned, their fights reportedly grew more and more wicked, their reconciliations less convincing. For two years, Gellhorn had been challenging Hemingway to quit “playacting war” and to go out and report it, but her husband had stubbornly stayed in Cuba with his boat, his friends, his cats, and his finca. Finally, in March 1944, when he took her up on her taunts, he did it in a way she would not soon forget or forgive. Any magazine in America would have paid Ernest Hemingway to be its correspondent. He volunteered to write for Collier’s, Gellhorn’s magazine. Since they had payroll and transit vouchers for only one correspondent at the time, Hemingway was sent to Europe first. When Gellhorn said that she would travel as a freelance writer with him, Hemingway lied and said that they did not allow women on the military flight. Gellhorn later learned that the actress Gertrude Lawrence sat next to Hemingway during the entire flight.
Hemingway flew to London on May 17, 1944, joking with Miss Lawrence about the fresh eggs she was carrying for her British friends and planning a pancake breakfast for everyone once they got to England. He told everyone that he was still angry at his wife for not saying good-bye to her special cat when she had left the finca. Martha Gellhorn had shipped out on May 13, the only passenger aboard a ship carrying a cargo of dynamite. The convoy suffered heavy losses during the hazardous twelve-day crossing.
Friends were not totally surprised when word eventually came of their separation and divorce.
INGRID BERGMAN AND Gary Cooper starred in the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the film premiered on July 10, 1943. The film was beautiful to look at—as was Bergman with her short hair—but reviewers and audiences criticized it for being too slow and too long. In truth, there was no real chemistry between Cooper and Bergman. Years later, the film that people would remember was the hastily written, plot-confused, low budget movie she did while waiting anxiously for word of whether she would get into For Whom the Bell Tolls. The movie was called Casablanca.
GUSTAVO DURÁN DID COME TO CUBA and was in charge of the Crook Factory until it was shut down by mutual consent in April 1943, but he and his wife had several fallings out with Hemingway and Gellhorn, and the Duráns soon moved out of the guest house and took up residence in the Ambos Mundos Hotel. By mid-1943, Gustavo Durán was working as an intelligence officer for Ambassador Braden and the Duráns were the hit of Havana society.
After the war, both Durán and Ambassador Braden were accused of being Communists and were dragged before the Un-American Activities Committee. “The real leftist is Hemingway,” Gustavo Durán declared before the Senate. “And I met Braden in Hemingway’s house.”
Spruille Braden, devastated at being charged with disloyalty after so many years of government service, also testified that Ernest Hemingway was the American Communist in Cuba. Braden then flew straight to Havana and asked for Hemingway’s forgiveness. “He said he was sorry—that he had to lie to keep his job—and expressed all kinds of apologies and seemed to be sincere,” Hemingway later told Dr. Herrera Sotolongo. “So I forgave him.”
Bob Joyce, Hemingway’s liaison with the embassy, quit to join the OSS about eight months after I did. I saw Joyce once in Europe a year later, but we were in the back of a darkened Dakota aircraft, waiting to jump into the night over Eastern Europe, our faces were blackened with burned cork, and I do not think that he recognized me.
I NEVER SAW Gregory or Patrick Hemingway again. Gigi became a well-respected physician, like his grandfather. Patrick became a big-game hunter in Africa, but returned to the States and became known as an environmentalist.
Oddly enough, it was the oldest son, John—the “Bumby” whom I’d never met while in Cuba—that I ran into in Hammelburg, Germany, in January 1945.
John H. Hemingway had joined the OSS in July 1944. Three months later, Bumby parachuted into France at Le Bosquét d’Orb, fifty kilometers north of Montpelier. His mission was to train local partisans on the art of infiltrating enemy positions. In late October, he was on a daylight reconnaissance along the Rhone Valley with a U.S. Army captain and a French partisan when they were attacked by an Alpenjäger unit. The Frenchman was shot in the belly and killed; Bumby and Captain Justin Green were wounded. During their interrogation by the Austrian officer in charge of the alpine unit, the officer realized that he had known Ernest, Hadley, and two-year-old Bumby in Schrüns in 1925. The officer canceled the interrogation and shipped the wounded, bleeding twenty-one-year-old Hemingway to a hospital in Alsace before he bled to death.
My team was sent into the POW camp near Hammelburg to help the prisoners escape. Young John Hemingway did get away that night, but he was recaptured four days later and taken to Stalag Luft III in Nuremberg, Germany. His father had to suffer the report that Bumby was Missing in Action until the young man was liberated in the spring of 1945, by which time he had survived more than six months in a succession of prisoner of war camps, each one with less food than the last. He flew to Cuba in June 1945 to be reunited with his father, his brothers, and his father’s new bride, Mary Welsh.
LIEUTENANT MALDONADO RETURNED to his post with the Cuban National Police, although he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. A few years before Hemingway left Cuba forever, Maldonado was on patrol near the finca and was reported to have killed Black Dog, Hemingway’s favorite pet at the time, bashing the canine to death with the butt of his rifle.
In the last days of Batista, Maldonado became famous for his power and brutality, driving through the provinces in a Willys jeep and shooting people almost at random. But he had chosen the wrong dictator with which to throw in his lot. Caballo Loco was arrested by the revolutionary government in 1959, the last of Batista’s local officers to stand trial. Everyone was sure that the tall killer would be hanged, and during the public trial Maldonado wept constantly, until his sallow, pockmarked aide and co-defendant finally stood up in the courtroom and said, “Hey, pal, stop crying like a damn whore. You did the killing and so did I.”
The aide was hanged. Inexplicably, Maldonado was sentenced to thirty years in prison. There were literal riots with the local Cubans demanding that the revolutionary government hold a new trial and condemn Maldonado to death. But that was the week that Fidel Castro ordered the halt to all executions of Batista’s officers guilty of murder.
Hemingway was still in Cuba then, and he told a friend that week, “He’s going to die of old age, damn it. That’s what is going to happen. For the good of the town and the country, the best thing would be to see him dead and buried.” It is reported that Hemingway volunteered to pull the trigger.
MARLENE DIETRICH, perhaps because she was born in Germany, became one of
the most aggressive Hollywood celebrities in the race to serve and entertain the American GI’s during the war. In 1943 she opened a USO Canteen in Hollywood for troops being shipped overseas. It was the only place where GI’s could see famous movie stars brewing coffee, baking doughnuts, and washing pots and pans. Dietrich always insisted on washing the pots and pans.
In 1944 and 1945 she went overseas with the traveling USO shows, and there were few entertainers the troops enjoyed more. Mostly, I think, it was her legs. And her voice. And the sexuality which hung around the woman like a cloud of incense. Even from fifty yards away on a foggy night, a GI watching Dietrich sing and dance had no illusions that he was seeing the girl next door.
I saw her perform once in France, but I am sure that she did not notice or recognize me. Besides there being several hundred soldiers and local citizens there, I was dressed in French peasant garb and had a thick beard.
Dietrich celebrated the liberation of Paris with Hemingway by going with him to “liberate” the Ritz and to drink the best champagne from that hotel’s cellars. She always professed her love and loyalty to the writer, and was devastated when he killed himself in 1961.
WINSTON GUEST LARGELY DROPPED OUT of sight in later years. In 1961, the year Hemingway died, Guest was the owner of Guest Aerovias de Mexico, S.A., the smallest of the three Mexican international airlines. We used that airline extensively for covert CIA operations during that decade.
After the Cuban revolution, Sinsky—Juan Dunabeitia—refused to follow the Ward Line merchant marine company he worked for to the United States. He returned to Spain, where he opened a maritime supplies store and eventually died.
Gregorio Fuentes celebrated his one hundredth birthday in Cuba in July 1997.
IN THE 1960s, while I was stationed in Berlin, I heard rumors of a female Soviet agent in her late thirties who had been recruited from Reinhard Gehlen’s old Nazi intelligence network. Gehlen had run the most efficient and competent German operation of the war.
What made rumors of this female interesting to me was the fact that her name was Elsa Halder, that she was a distant cousin of the late Erwin Rommel, that she looked anything but Aryan—dark hair, dark eyes, dark complexion—that she had grown up in a German diplomat’s family posted in Spain during most of the 1930s, and—of greatest interest to me—she had won a bronze medal swimming for Germany in the 1936 Olympics. Her specialty had been long-distance events.
I never looked deeper into her identity or whereabouts and never ran across her in my arena of operations.
NOR DID REICHSFÜHRER Heinrich Himmler give up his quest for total power within the Nazi intelligence community and within the Third Reich. In the OSS, we were certain that Himmler wished not only to be deputy Führer but to replace Hitler when the time came. That thought gave us chills and kept us diligent at our work.
All through 1943, Himmler and his RSHA SD AMT VI colleagues looked for ways to discredit Admiral Canaris and his Abwehr. In January 1943, Himmler appointed Ernst Kaltenbrunner head of the RSHA, and Kaltenbrunner’s first act was to elevate Colonel Walter Schellenberg—Himmler’s and Heydrich’s co-author in Operation Raven in Cuba—as chief of Department VI. Kaltenbrunner’s and Schellenberg’s first priority was to destroy the Abwehr.
They got their chance in January 1944. After complicated machinations by the SD, a member of the Abwehr in Istanbul, a Dr. Erich Vermehren, defected to the British. On February 10, the British—guided by the hands of William Stephenson and Ian Fleming in MI6—confirmed Vermehren’s defection.
Hitler exploded. Two days later, the Führer signed a decree that abolished the Abwehr as an independent organization, subordinating it to the RSHA and giving Heinrich Himmler complete control over all foreign intelligence. Canaris was immediately removed from the post in which he had served for nine years.
Later in 1944, after the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, Schellenberg himself arrested Admiral Canaris, whose only crime might have been knowing about the plot and not warning Hitler. The former intelligence chief was taken to a meat-packing plant and repeatedly hanged from a meat hook, his arms tied behind him with wire. The execution of all the conspirators was filmed, and Adolf Hitler spent his evenings watching these films over and over.
THEODOR SCHLEGEL HAD BEEN ARRESTED immediately upon his return to Brazil in the summer of 1942. Delgado and Becker had arranged for the rounding up of all the Abwehr agents and networks in South America, soon to be replaced by SD networks. Schlegel and six of his associates were brought before the Brazilian Tribunal de Seguranca Nacional in October of that year. Schlegel was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Hauptsturmführer Johann Siegfried Becker had fled to Brazil the day after Delgado murdered the two Germans at Point Roma, but Becker avoided arrest for two and a half more years, setting up SD networks to replace the betrayed Abwehr operations, generally creating mischief without many real results, until his arrest in April 1945, only a few weeks before the collapse of the Third Reich and the suicide of his Führer.
J. EDGAR HOOVER DIED ON TUESDAY, May 2, 1972, a national icon if not exactly a national hero anymore.
I was sixty years old that year, serving as a CIA station chief in Calcutta. Just another aging civil servant dreaming of retirement. I had not been in the United States for thirty years.
When news of Hoover’s death reached me in the middle of the night over the secure line, I picked up another phone and called an old friend of mine in Langley, Virginia. My friend called a mole we had long since placed within the Bureau, who, in turn, soon set in motion the delivery of a letter to the new acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray. This letter was sent via the attorney general’s office to avoid interception by certain of Hoover’s old cronies. The letter was marked “PERSONAL—DELIVER TO ADDRESSEE ONLY.” L. Patrick Gray read the letter on May 4, 1972.
The letter began: “Immediately after discovering Hoover’s death, Clyde Tolson made a call from Hoover’s residence to FBI Headquarters, presumably to J. P. Mohr. Tolson directed that all the confidential files kept in Hoover’s office be moved out. By 11 A.M. they were all taken to Tolson’s residence. It is unknown whether these files are still there. The point is—J. P. Mohr lied to you when he told you that such files do not exist—They do. And things are being systematically hidden from you.”
Acting Director L. Patrick Gray immediately sent the letter to the FBI laboratory for examination. The lab reported only that different typewriters had been used: a Smith Corona, elite type, for the envelope; an IBM, pica type, for the letter; that neither the envelope nor the letter bore watermarks, and that the letter itself was a reproduction, a product of direct electrostatic process rather than the indirect, such as a Xerox.
Gray demanded an explanation from Assistant Director Mohr, who once again insisted that there had been no secret and confidential files. Gray wrote a personal note to Mohr—“I believe you!”
Miss Gandy, Hoover’s private secretary for the past fifty-four years, had moved 164 private files to cardboard storage boxes which were taken first to Clyde Tolson’s home and eventually to the basement of J. Edgar Hoover’s home at Thirtieth Place NW. From there they disappeared.
My friend from Langley reached me again in Calcutta on June 21, 1972. You would recognize my friend’s name. He was famous for ferreting out moles within the CIA. He hated Soviet moles, but he despised FBI moles just as much. Some called him paranoid. He had been a friend of Bill Donovan’s during the old OSS days and had worked with me for years on the Special Desk dealing with the British and the Israelis. We had both dined with Kim Philby before that double agent fled to Moscow. We had both vowed never to repeat that oversight.
“I have them,” said my friend that night on the secure line.
“All of them?” I said.
“All of them,” said my friend. “They’re stored in the place we agreed.”
I said nothing for a moment. After all those years, I could now go home if I wished.
“They make for interesting reading,” said my friend that night. “If we published them, nothing would ever be the same in Washington again.”
“Nothing would be the same anywhere,” I said.
“Talk to you soon,” said my friend.
“Yes.”
And I set down the telephone very gently.
34
I DID NOT COME HOME to the United States in 1972, nor when I retired from the Agency late in 1977.
I came home four days ago; almost fifty-six years to the day after I left the country, flying from Miami down to Havana to meet a man named Ernest Hemingway.
No one plans to be an old man, to watch most of one’s friends fall by the wayside, but that has been my fate. Almost eighty-six years old. As a younger man, I had been shot four times, survived two serious automobile accidents and one dramatic aircraft wreck, was lost at sea in the Bay of Bengal for four days and nights, and once spent a week wandering through the Himalayas in the middle of winter. I survived it all. Pure luck. Most things are pure luck.
And my luck was good until ten months ago. I had my driver take me into Madrid for one of my regular, biannual physicals; my doctor, who seems old at the age of sixty-two, always chides me for coming to him. “How long has it been since even Spanish doctors made house calls?” I always joke.
But this day last August there was no joking. He explained to me the technical terms and the simple truth of it all. “If you were younger,” he said, his eyes truly sad, “we would try surgery. But at age eighty-five…”